Tag Archives: sex

The book is available NOW!! Click the link below or the Lulu link to your right! Us pirates at Six Ft. Swells Press are so thrilled to publish, Hell and High Water by Wolfgang Carstens, that we are hitting the rum hard in total celebration! To pre-atone for our drunken ways we are offering the book at a 25% DISCOUNT now until November 15th in honor of Wolfgang Carstens 25 years of matrimony, chronicled here in Hell and High Water.

The poems in Hell and High Water offer the gritty reality of a poet, husband, provider, father and shady romantic wrestling with life’s responsibilities and his own primal urges. From the familiar dinner table to disastrous family vacations and mail order sex toys, Wolfgang Carstens presents us with vulnerability, humor, rawness, regret and the rejoicing in twenty-five years of intimacy with another as no other poet can. Carstens has wickedly disguised Hell and High Water as a twisted yet tender guide for the rest of us in maintaining the wildness among minivans, mortgages and matrimony.

The water is rising and the flames grow hotter as October 19th nears. Here is an early review of the book and a poem to get you through the weekend. Order information to follow.

Wolfgang Carstens promises “hell and high water” in his new book from Six Ft. Swells Press, and that’s exactly what you get. These poems blaze short and hot like matches, but baby, you’ll feel the burn; they both praise love and raise the level of pithy skewering to new heights. In Hell and High Water, whether he’s getting lucky (“i don’t write love poems”), or ruminating (“len,” “contrary”), Carstens remains true to himself and his sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious, episodic visions of life.—Dianne Borsenik, publisher of NightBallet Press, author of Age of Aquarius (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016)

“Todd Cirillo’s, Burning the Evidence, leaves your heart like “hail shattered windshields”. It is broken and beautiful, cynical with a hint of hope and a twist of absurdism, ugly but true. The poems hit you like a .357 Magnum. Some ask questions that others seem to answer. While some poems are almost too honest to bare. One page Todd is “just checking to make sure she’s still there and a few pages down he’s sleeping alone to the sound of tires on wet pavement and the clock”. This glorious, fragmented storyline is so perfectly threaded in highs and lows, heartaches and breaks, goodbyes and come-ons, your head will twist.”

Today, we at Six Ft. Swells are proud to announce that our newest title, The Girl Who Left You by Amber Decker, is now available! Grab a coldie, find someone you want to know intimately, turn the lights down and open the book up to lines such as:

“Sleep never comes soon enough

to those who suffer

in the arms of the ones

they do not love.”

It is a rare book that you will devour from cover to cover in one sitting like a bag of potato chips. It is a delicious, naughty, feels-so-good affair without guilt–brought to you by Six Ft. Swells Press, who always gives it to you real good.

Our co-conspirator, Todd Cirillo, says, “Amber writes with unmasked bravery, a fierceness followed by sexy, followed by sadness and then strength. Poems of Dairy Queens, cornfields, backseats on backroads, the starting of something new and the holding onto what once was. That sound of the first button popping off, the zipper going down, and the way the shadows hit the space all around.”

Mmmm, can’t you just taste it already? The Girl Who Left You is #4 in our “Top Shelf Poetry” series, and is available on Amazon.

Hello Mates!
Yes, we are sailing in the summer breeze, frosty brews in hand, smiling up at the sun. We haven’t just been kicking our feet up, though, there is work being done after hours that is causing all the smiling. We are happy as New Orleans clams (wait, there are clams in NOLA, right?) to announce that we will soon be releasing a new book of poetry!

Poet Amber Decker

This is exciting news in itself, but when you see this collection of poems by the amazing Amber Decker of West Virgina, titled, The Girl Who Left You, everyone will be raising their mugs to her talent and ability to knock us on our asses with one phrase. In true After Hours fashion, Amber’s poems are so visceral and rich, we can almost drink them. And if they were whiskey, we’d drink the whole bottle, loving the way it burned all the way down.

Here is what we’re talking about:

AT 7PM
by Amber Decker

You board a plane to Las Vegas
bound for a supporting role in a wedding
you do not believe has anything to do with love.
Earlier, we’d made love on an old mattress
on the floor of your best friend’s apartment,
the hard shell of your suitcase banging
into my knee, your mouth wet
with the harsh scrape of my name.
There was little romance in it,
only the frenzied unleashing
of the not-knowing,
the possibility of unhappy endings, cutthroat desire.
I do not love you.
Or, rather, I love you
as I would love a deck of cards
while waiting for a train or a bus.
Our goodbyes fly across a crowded room
like small white birds.
At the ticket counter,
you kiss me with lips smooth as Carey Grant.
In the car, the radio plays songs to name
every sort of love
that does not bloom
in my heart for you,
and the long white lines of the road,
like dark-haired college boys
with bodies pale as ghosts,
take me home to bed.

***

So, friends, pour yourselves a coldie, grab your nearest sweetheart, and kick your feet up (for us). The Girl Who Left You will arrive shortly, and you’ll want to receive her properly.